60' Cassette

Crude electro-acoustic strategies are at work in the tape-on-tape monolith that is Richard Garet's 60' Cassette, with the Uruguayan born resident of New York declaring his intentions as such: "100% treated audio cassette material. some blank. some erased. some demagnetized. etc." The conceptualization of this work as a reframing of one particular medium through its applied / accelerated disintegration is only the album's beginning. There is an implied history in this form destruction, as Garet pricks the murky surfaces of his tapes that show the bruises of multiple generations of recordings without much in the way of general maintenance (e.g. rasping hiss, mud-gray compression, spluttering motors, etc.), and he scrapes together rancorous textures of iron filing shards, flecked dried scabs, and garbled noise. Irradiated drones and thrumming bellows from the machine, the underlying source, the tape itself, etc. spew throughout the haptic chorales, drowning them in heavy, elemental waveform crush. Garet's immersive work has long paralleled the grand architectural scores of minimalism, and those forces are still at work in 60' Cassette, though obfuscated in the flurries of fetid noise and unspooled tape. Look to the crumbling roar of Kevin Drumm, Chop Shop, or more aptly the Japanese obscurantist Toukaseibunshi for a likeminded approach.